Thoughts On Technology

Top 10 Redis Resources Online

Chances are you’ve heard of Memcache. Tons of websites use it to speed up page load times. I often say that Redis is like Memcache on steroids. You may not have heard of Redis, but if you’re using Memcache or APC, you should see how Redis could improve what you’re already doing. If you’re not using Memcache or APC yet, don’t bother – I urge you to take a look at Redis for a bunch of reasons.

First, Memcache is a key-value store only. You set a string value under a string key, and that’s it. With Redis, on the other hand, you have the luxury of several different types of data storage, including keys and values, but Redis also supports hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets.

An example to help explain why this is such a huge improvement. Say you have a big array of data, such as the kind that can come back from a web service request, like a parsed XML file or JSON packet. With Memcache, to store this in memory you have to serialize the data, often base64 encode the data, and then store it on the way in, and then to get a portion of the data back out again, you have to get the whole string, base64 decode it, deserialize it and then you can read from it. These extra steps needlessly chew up compute cycles.

With the same data object stored in a Redis Hash, for example, you can have instant access to the data stored in any key of the hash, you don’t have to grab the whole thing, deserialize it and all that mess. Just a single line of code, and boom, there’s your data. Much more elegant.

Another key reason Redis is superior to Memcache is that when you ask Memcache to store something, it’s in memory and that’s it. If your server goes down and you have to reboot, you have to repopulate your Memcache data over again. If your app has gotten huge, and your cache is huge, this can not only take awhile but puts a huge strain on your database server during this so-called “cache warmup” period. Unlike Memcache, Redis actually stores a copy of its data to a file on disk in the background, so if you stop and start your Redis server, it reloads everything automatically. It does this mind-blowingly fast, too, like millions of keys in seconds.

Finally, Redis supports master-slave configurations that you can use to build high-availability systems more easily. In the upcoming release (everyone is very eager for) Redis Cluster will support sharding out of the box!

So, now that you want to dig in and start learning Redis, here are my…

You may be wondering about NoSQL and where Redis fits into this discussion. When people bring up NoSQL, I tend to think of MongoDB. Unlike Memcached and Redis, MongoDB is a general purpose document/object (think JSON) store that (strangely enough) allows you to use some SQL-like commands to retrieve subsets of your data. I think of Redis as a data structure server. You don’t use SQL to talk to Redis, so I guess it could be considered along with other NoSQL solutions. You can compare Redis to MongoDB by going to try.mongodb.org/

2 responses to “Top 10 Redis Resources Online”

… and last, but not least, if you want to keep up with what is happening in the Redis world and how others are using it (use cases and case studies), you’d probably enjoy http://nosql.mypopescu.com/tagged/redis